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Even though most Americans have become very frustrated with this economy, the reality is that the vast majority of them still have no idea just how bad our economic decline has been or how much trouble we are going to be in if we don't make dramatic changes immediately. If we do not educate the American people about how deathly ill the U.S. economy has become, then they will just keep falling for the same old lies that our politicians keep telling them. Just "tweaking" things here and there is not going to fix this economy. We truly do need a fundamental change in direction. America is consuming far more wealth than it is producing and our debt is absolutely exploding. If we stay on this current path, an economic collapse is inevitable. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers from 2011 that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up. >>>

The following are 50 economic numbers from 2011 that are almost too crazy to believe....

#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty.

#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be "low income" or impoverished.

#3 If the number of Americans that "wanted jobs" was the same today as it was back in 2007, the "official" unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.

#4 The average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is now over 40 weeks.

#5 One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.

#6 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then. >>>

#10 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages. >>>

#17 The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year. >>>

#36 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.

#37 A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7%) than has ever been measured before.

#38 Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007. >>>

#41 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps. >>>

#45 For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit of nearly 1.3 trillion dollars. That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars. >>>

#48 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.

#49 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.

#50 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

During 2011 we made a lot of progress in educating the American people about our economic problems, but we still have a long way to go.

Hopefully next year more Americans than ever will wake up, because 2012 is going to represent a huge turning point for this country.

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The country can "survive" an 0bamination. But how does it survive a populace that voted for him?

U12 = people that are unemployed for up to 12 months and want to work.

This got reduced until today when they use the U3 number -

U3 = people that are unemployed for up to 3 months and still want to work.

If the U12 number was still being used today, unemployment would be over 20%

Inflation used to be calculated by the increased cost of the same product over a period of time. To help Social Security to remain solvent, the rate of inflation needed to be "leveled" out. As inflation rises, so do Cost Of Living Adjustments.

To resolve COLA increases, they introduced the concept of "substitute" items. This means that inflation is measured over a period of time with a basket of related products.

For example, if you measured inflation, using the same product method, over the past 5 years by the price of a pound of filet mignon, there would be a substantial increase in price, therefore inflation.

Substitute measurement allows you to compare the price of a pound of filet mignon 5 years ago to the price today of a pound of ground chuck. They reason that both products are beef and therefore suitable substitutions. This is how we can go for the last 2 years without any COLA adjustment on SS. Can anyone with a straight face say there has been no measurable inflation over the past 2 years??

If we measured by same product method today, inflation would be over 10%. Therefor SS payments would be increasing by 10% and depleting the Federal Ponzi Scheme all the quicker.

Not quite. The thirty million kids born in the last 11 years will begin entering the workforce in another 5-7 years, a few million per year, but that's an ongoing process. Every year, the workforce expands as the population expands, generally to the tune of about 2 million new workers per year. It takes job growth of roughly 125,000 jobs per month to simply keep the unemployment rate static for that reason. If you fall below that level of growth, then the number of unemployed persons rises.

Compare these numbers to the statistics on the wealthy. Their income growth, their net worth, percentages of wealth held by them, percentages of stock, changes in political contributions, etc.

Not this idiocy again.

You want the wealthy to stop contributing to politicians? That's easy: Just eliminate the power that politicians have given themselves to regulate the markets and decide who gets rich(er) and who gets poor(er). As long as government can dictate winners and losers in the marketplace, people will seek to use that power on their own behalf.

The government must keep and maintain a military, correct? How do we keep this military supplied with food, weapons, and material supplies? Someone has to make them, and the government buys them. Boom. The government has now "picked a winner" in the marketplace.

Any form of taxation is going to benefit some groups more than others and hurt some groups more than others. The existence of taxes is government interference.

Originally Posted by Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

From the moment this country was created, laws and policies were able to influence the society and markets in a way that benefited some and hurt others.

There's no such thing as a government or a policy that isn't going to have some effect on the economy, that's fantasy, it's theoretical utopia.

As long as the government exists, there is going to be influence in the economy. Your "solution" is simply impossible.

And your original point was...what? You pretty much slapped yourself down there, WeeWee. :D:D

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In actual dollars, President Obama’s $4.4 trillion in deficit spending in just three years is 37 percent higher than the previous record of $3.2 trillion (held by President George W. Bush) in deficit spending for an entire presidency. It’s no small feat to demolish an 8-year record in just 3 years.

Under Obama’s own projections, interest payments on the debt are on course to triple from 2010 (his first budgetary year) to 2018, climbing from $196 billion to $685 billion annually.

The government must keep and maintain a military, correct? How do we keep this military supplied with food, weapons, and material supplies? Someone has to make them, and the government buys them. Boom. The government has now "picked a winner" in the marketplace.

Any form of taxation is going to benefit some groups more than others and hurt some groups more than others. The existence of taxes is government interference.

You miss one of the obvious issues. Government isn't acting as a regulator when it comes to military expenditures, it is acting as a consumer, and like any consumer, it chooses goods and services based on its criteria. Suppliers compete for contracts, and they compete based on the quality price and utility of their products. Unlike the cronyism that we see in the financial markets, where the government is rewarding its pals with bailouts and transfers of taxpayer dollars, the driving force in military procurement is competition.

Originally Posted by Wei Wu Wei

You're saying just stop power from being power?

From the moment this country was created, laws and policies were able to influence the society and markets in a way that benefited some and hurt others.

There's no such thing as a government or a policy that isn't going to have some effect on the economy, that's fantasy, it's theoretical utopia.

As long as the government exists, there is going to be influence in the economy. Your "solution" is simply impossible.

Like all socialists, you presume that because I want less government, I want no government, or that because I oppose an action at the federal level, I must therefore oppose it being done at all. That is the classic leftist straw man argument against smaller government, and it doesn't hold up.

No, my "solution" is that government be scaled back so that its power to impact the economy is minimized. The Constitution placed specific limits on the powers of the federal government. When the federal government exceeds those limits, it encroaches on the rights of the states and the people, respectively, and destroys economic liberty (which is the foundation for all other liberties). Government is supposed to be our servant, not our master, but a bloated permanent government run by a spoiled, irresponsible governing class is not going to serve anyone but itself. Forcing the government back to its Constitutional limits would force it out of the various economic spheres that it now intrudes upon, and would reduce its influence to manageable levels. There is nothing in the Constitution that should allow the federal government to transfer tax revenues to investment bankers or auto companies, or to dictate employment terms, insurance policies or agricultural output to the whole nation. The Interstate Commerce Clause was never meant to be a catchall that would allow the federal government to regulate the wheat that a farmer grows to feed himself and his family and livestock, it was meant to prevent the states from setting up internal trade barriers.